State Crimes Against Democracy

State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs) are actions undertaken in direct violation of sworn oaths of office to circumvent, exploit, or otherwise undermine or subvert laws and institutions to advance personal or political gain and/or to silence or otherwise suppress public foreknowledge and awareness.

New research in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (Sage publications, February 2010) addresses the concept of “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD). Professor Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University writes that SCADs involve highlevel government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, the Watergate break-in, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election (felon disenfranchisement program), and fixed intelligence on WMDs to justify the Iraq War.(1)

Other suspected SCADs include the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooting of George Wallace, the October Surprise near the end of the Carter presidency, military grade anthrax mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001. The proven SCADs have a long trail of congressional hearings, public records, and academic research establishing the truth of the activities. The suspected SCADs listed above have substantial evidence of covert actions with countervailing deniability that tend to leave the facts in dispute.(2)

The term “conspiracy theory” is often used to denigrate and discredit inquiry into the veracity of suspected SCADs. Labeling SCAD research as “conspiracy theory” is an effective method of preventing ongoing investigations from being reported in the corporate media and keep them outside of broader public scrutiny. Psychologist Laurie Manwell, University of Guelph, addresses the psychological advantage that SCAD actors hold in the public sphere. Manwell, writing in American Behavioral Scientist (Sage 2010) states, “research shows that people are far less willing to examine information that disputes, rather than confirms, their beliefs . . . pre-existing beliefs can interfere with SCADs inquiry, especially in regards to September 11, 2001.”(3)

Professor Steven Hoffman, visiting scholar at the University of Buffalo, recently acknowledged this phenomenon in a study “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification.” Hoffman concluded, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. In fact, for the most part people completely ignore contrary information.” (4)

Sometimes even new academic research goes largely unreported when the work contradicts prevailing understandings of recent historical events. A specific case of unreported academic research is the peer reviewed journal article from Open Chemical Physics Journal (Volume 2, 2009), entitled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust for the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.” In the abstract the authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.(5)

National Medal of Science recipient (1999) Professor Lynn Margulis from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is one of many academics who supports further open investigative research in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Margulis recently wrote in Rock Creek Free Press, “all three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition.”6 Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), announced a decisive milestone February 19, 2010 at a press conference in San Francisco, CA. More than 1,000 architects and engineers worldwide now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex on September 11, 2001.(7)

Credible scientific evidence brings into question the possibility that some aspects of the events of 9/11 involved State Crimes Against Democracy. Psychologically this is a very hard concept for Americans to even consider. However, ignoring the issue in the context of multiple proven SCADs since World War II seems far more dangerous for democracy than the consequences of future scientific inquiry and transparent, fact-based investigative reporting. Anything short of complete, open discourse based on all the evidence about these critical issues in our society relating to the possible continuation of SCADs is simply a matter of censorship.(8)

Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, former director of Project Censored, and coeditor of Censored 2010.

Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, Director of Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, and co-editor of Censored 2010.

For more background reading on this subject with specifics on the controversial cases mentioned in this paragraph, see the following scholarly works: Robert Abele, The Anatomy of a Deception: A Reconstruction and Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: University Press of America, 2010); Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009); Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking Adult, 2002); Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006); Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (New York: Olive Branch press, 2008); Mark Crispin Miller, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (New York: Ig Publishing, 2008); Kenneth O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1993); William Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Marin Luther King (Updated) (New York: Verso, 2008); Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (New York: Tarcher and Penguin, 2003); selected works of Peter Dale Scott, including Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008); Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning us to Death (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005); Lawrence Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997); Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd Edition, 2003);

AbstractThis article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homologous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits.The article then examines a recent example of contemporary,“deconstructive” scholarly analysis and inventory of presidential “Orwellian doublespeak.” The preoccupation among contemporary critical scholarship with “discourse analysis” and language gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of real-event anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers.

The irrelevance of habeas corpus and the abolition of “double jeopardy,” secret and protracted outsourcing of detention and torture, and increasing geographic prevalence of surveillance technologies across Anglo-American “democracies” have many citizens concerned about the rapidly convergent, authoritarian behavior of political oligarchs and the actual destruction of sovereignty and democratic values under the onslaught of antiterrorism hubris, propaganda, and fear. This article examines synchronic legislative isomorphism in responses to 9/11 in the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union, and Australia in terms of enacted terrorism legislation and, also, diachronic, oligarchic isomorphism in the manufacture of fear within a convergent world by comparing the “Politics of Fear” being practiced today to Stalinist—Russian and McCarthyist—U.S. abuse of “fear.” The immediate future of Anglo-American democratic hubris, threats to civil society, and oligarchic threats to democratic praxis are canvassed. This article also raises the question as to whether The USA PATRIOT Acts of 2001/2006, sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, are examples, themselves, of state crimes against democracy. In the very least, any democratically inclined White House occupant in 2009 would need to commit to repealing these repressive, and counterproductive, acts.

In Denial of Democracy: Social Psychological Implications for Public Discourse on State Crimes Against Democracy Post-9/11

Laurie A. ManwellUniversity of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, lmanwell@uoguelph.caAbstractProtecting democracy requires that the general public be educated on how people can be manipulated by government and media into forfeiting their civil liberties and duties. This article reviews research on cognitive constructs that can prevent people from processing information that challenges preexisting assumptions about government, dissent, and public discourse in democratic societies. Terror management theory and system justification theory are used to explain how preexisting beliefs can interfere with people’s examination of evidence for state crimes against democracy (SCADs), specifically in relation to the events of September 11, 2001, and the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reform strategies are proposed to motivate citizens toward increased social responsibility in a post-9/11 culture of propagandized fear, imperialism, and war.

Christopher L. HinsonFlorida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA,chris.l.hinson@gmail.comAbstractThis article explores evidence of, and provides insight into, secrecy-related information actions that are sometimes used to circumvent established government policy and law. These information actions may also be used to cover up such circumventions after the fact. To better understand secrecy as a negative information action and its impact on democracy, secrecy-related information actions are described according to methods, information technologies, and knowledge support. Negative information actions are willful and deliberate acts designed to keep government information from those in government and the public entitled to it. Negative information actions subvert the rule of law and the constitutional checks and balances. Negative information actions used by government officials to violate policies and laws during the IranContra Affair are identified, analyzed, and categorized by type. The relative impact of negative information actions on enlightened citizen understanding is demonstrated using a Negative Information Action Model by assigning a location according to type on a continuum of enlightened citizen understanding. Findings are compared with democratic theory and conspiracy doctrine.

AbstractThis article explores the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of research on state crimes against democracy (SCADs). In contrast to conspiracy theories, which speculate about each suspicious event in isolation, the SCAD construct delineates a general category of criminality and calls for crimes that fit this category to be examined comparatively. Using this approach, an analysis of post—World War II SCADs and suspected SCADs highlights a number of commonalities in SCAD targets, timing, and policy consequences. SCADs often appear where presidential politics and foreign policy intersect. SCADs differ from earlier forms of political corruption in that they frequently involve political, military, and/or economic elites at the very highest levels of the social and political order.The article concludes by suggesting statutory and constitutional reforms to improve SCAD prevention and detection.

Alexander KouzminSouthern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales (NSW), Australia; University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia (SA), Australia, akouzmin{at}scu.edu.au

Abstract

The ellipses of due diligence riddling the official account of the 9/11 incidents continue being ignored by scholars of policy and public administration. This article introduces intellectual context for examining the policy heuristic “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD) (deHaven-Smith, 2006) and its usefulness for better understanding patterns of state criminality of which no extant policy analytic model gives adequate account.This article then introduces papers included in this symposium examining the chimerical presence and perfidious legacy of state criminality against democracy.

About Me

We are an international group of acredited academics who have researched and documented SCADs. We ask you to join us in exposing SCADs and taking action to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.

STATE CRIMES AGAINST DEMOCRACY TESTAMENT AND PROCLAMATION

Testament and Proclamation

Democracy and popular control of government require public officials who speak truthfully about their intentions and actions; who respect, obey, and execute the nation's laws and treaties without deference to wealth and power and certainly without exceptions for themselves; and who openly and thoroughly investigate defense failures, financial crises, environmental disasters, and other national tragedies. To abrogate any of these responsibilities is to abuse the public trust and attack democracy itself.

We the Undersigned find, based on substantial available evidence, that the United States Government, including the Office of the President, Congress and ancillary agencies, have intentionally, systematically and serially defrauded the American people in what we find to be State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD): actions undertaken in direct violation of sworn oaths of office to circumvent, exploit, undermine or subvert laws, the constitutional order, or the public awareness essential to popular control of government.

Most recently, these State Crimes Against Democracy have included:

1) The BP oil spill debacle in the Gulf of Mexico, the initiation of and response to which have constituted criminal neglect if not deliberate malfeasance. i ii iii iv

2) The mortgage lending fraud and subsequent bailout of the most powerful U.S. syndicated banking interests, precipitating untold hardship upon the American people into the foreseeable future, not to mention world financial destabilization.vi

In at least these instances of the Gulf oil spill and mortgage lending fraud, judicious warnings were well in place to head off catastrophe, warnings that U.S. governmental entities and Congressional oversight committees either suppressed or permitted to be circumvented. There exists a history of collusion between the US government, including the CIA, and agents of BP in executing secretive and illegal actions; now there is a growing body of evidence that both are suppressing the facts on the origins and severity of the current oil disaster and the future environmental, public health and safety, and economic impact. x

In addition to these two recent devastating events, we find as components of a broader platform of syndicated state sponsored fraud and malfeasance perpetrated against the American people, other peoples across the globe, and democracy itself, the following:

1) Willful manufacture and proffering of false information to garner public support for the war on the sovereign nation of Iraq and its citizens. xi These illegal actions have resulted in the deaths of well over 100,000 Iraqi citizens – and possibly over 1,000,000 - and over 4,000 American soldiers. xii As a belligerent occupying force, the U.S. government continues to fail to meet its obligations under the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on the Land, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and customary international humanitarian laws, resulting in failure to provide even the most basic water, food, medical, and security requirements for the Iraqi people. xiii

2) The illegal war on the sovereign nation of Afghanistan and its citizens. This illegal war has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan civilians and nearly 2,000 coalition force personnel. xv xvi xvii As a belligerent occupying force, the U.S. government continues to fail to meet its obligations under the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on the Land, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and customary international humanitarian laws, resulting in failure to provide even the most basic water, food, medical, and security requirements for the Afghani people.xviii

3) The passing and continuance of PATRIOT Acts I and II by the Bush and Obama administrations in direct violation of the United States Constitution, including the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.xix As a result, the civil liberties of the American people and of other peoples have been usurped with exaggerated and in some cases fraudulent claims of terrorist threat accompanied by illegal spying, arrest without warrant, torture, and assassination. xx xxi xxii

4) The refusal by U.S. governmental agencies, including under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to independently and thoroughly investigate the events prior to and during September 11, 2001, including material, forensic evidence, especially since these events have been the primary basis for the crimes detailed in 1, 2, and 3 above.

5) Repeated public statements, by both Democratic and Republican officials, that another catastrophic event, such as another 9/11, would be beneficial for garnering public support for the current administration and/or incumbents and for Executive actions. xxiii xxiv

6) Executive usurpation of the media to manipulate the public into supporting wars of aggression, as well as the censorship and repression of a free press and internet communication. xxv

7) Syndicated fraud of (and subsequent cover-up about) voting in low income precincts in the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections. xxvi

We the Undersigned call for plebiscite hearings into the advisability of incorporating as legal framework State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD) into federal law, including statutes that would: prohibit political crimes from having a statute of limitations; mandate minimum mandatory sentences for specified high crimes; prohibit presidential pardons where the president himself stands to gain; and specify maximum prison sentences for specified SCADs. xxvii

We the Undersigned find such initiative essential for restoring faith among Americans, and people the world over, in the promise for democracy and justice that the United States once did, and must again, hold out for what Abraham Lincoln once declared the last, best hope for humanity on Earth.

Sources:

Blum, William. (2004). Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World
War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.

Griffin, David Ray (2006) The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God: A Political, Economic, Religious Statement, with John B. Cobb, Richard A. Falk
and Catherine Keller. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Sands, Philippe. (2008). Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American
Values. New York: Palgrave.
Roberts P.W. (2004). A War Against Truth: In Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq.
Vancouver, B.C: Raincoast Books.

Scahill J. (2004). Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
New York: Nation.

vii Huge financial frauds have been perpetrated roughly every ten years since the early 1980s: the pillaging of the Savings & Loan industry, the bankruptcy of WorldCom and Enron, and the global financial collapse caused by supposedly transparent, yet deliberately opaque and poorly collateralized investment products. In each instance, the main players used some of their fraud-derived gains to buy political influence and undermine the government’s policing of their activities so they could continue to escape detection, steal from their depositors and investors, and siphon purloined revenues to more political contributions. See Black, W. K. (2005). The best way to rob a bank is to own one. Austin: University of Texas Press. See also: Calavita, K., Pontell, H., & Tillman, R. (1999). Big money crime: Fraud and politics in the savings and loan crisis.

ix See summary and links provided by Adam Curtis of the BBC: “As the film makes clear, the British persuaded the Americans to mount a coup by telling them that Mossadegh was leading Iran towards communism - represented in Iran by the communist Tudeh party. This was not true. One of the leading Iranian historians, Maziar Behrooz, has stated simply, "The perceived Tudeh - communist - threat, as feared by the perpetrators of the coup, was not real." But the CIA, led by Allen Dulles, believed it. Dulles sent the CIA's top Middle East agent - called Kermit Roosevelt - to run Operation Ajax. The plan, drawn up by the British and the Americans, was to bribe the street gangs of Tehran to create chaos, and then install an army general, General Zahedi, as prime minister.The only problem was that the Shah of Iran - Mohammed Reza Shah - didn't want to join in the plot. But then the Americans sent General Norman Schwarzkopf to the Shah's palace. (Schwarzkopf's son led Operation Desert Storm). He bluntly told the Shah that he had no choice as Britain and America had already decided to go ahead….The coup succeeded and Mossadegh was overthrown.

“But the price for the British was high. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company now had to share the oil - with the Americans. A new consortium was formed. The leading American oil companies took a 40% share, while AIOC also had a 40% share. And in 1954 it changed its name to British Petroleum.

“But the price for the Americans was also high. They had got the oil, and they had installed a pliable dictator in Iran. But the anger against their ruthless conspiracy was still seething - not just among the left but also among the conservative merchant class. These two groups would come together under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978 - their persistent anger at America and Britain being the force that bound them together. But British Petroleum didn't give up on trying to subvert and avoid the decisions of democratic governments. In particular its own, British, government.”

x Regarding the extent of the oil disaster cover-up, Matthew Simmons, prominent advocate about about the “peak oil” crisis, stated the following in a Bloomberg interview: “…it’s a total diversion - that’s the gas condensation that was trapped in the drilling riser which blew off the wellhead at 10:01 PM CT on April 20th, it’s a mile-long compressed natural gas... What we don’t know anything about is the open hole which is caused by the drill bit when it tossed the blow-out preventer way out of the hole…and 120,000 minimum of toxic poison has now covered the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. So what they’re talking about is the biggest environmental cover-up ever. And they knew that that well, that riser, would finally deplete. And then they could say it’s over. And unfortunately, we now have killed the Gulf of Mexico…Some 5-10 miles away is what the NOIA research vessels have now proved is a deep oil lake that is growing by the day and it’s very toxic oil and its gases are very lethal. Basically if we have a hurricane now, we would have to evacuate the Gulf Coast….When people find out the magnitude of the story, I don’t know if we can technically clean up the Gulf but it would cost at least a trillion dollars…”

xxi See also “Fox’s Chief Legal Analyst: Bush and Cheney Should Have Been Indicted for “Torturing, for Spying, for Arresting Without Warrant,” Raw Story, July 12, 2010.
http://www.alternet.org/story/147517/

xxiii See remarks by officials reported in the following articles, including this most recent example cited by Edward Luce, Financial Times, July 13, 2010, “Obama Faces Growing Credibility Crisis”: “The bottom line here is that Americans don’t believe in President Obama’s leadership,” says Rob Shapiro, another former Clinton official and a supporter of Mr Obama. “He has to find some way between now and November of demonstrating that he is a leader who can command confidence and, short of a 9/11 event or an Oklahoma City bombing, I can’t think of how he could do that.” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/434315b2-8ea6-11df-8a67-00144feab49a.html

xxiv As discussed in Manwell (2010) : “As the November 2008 U.S. presidential election neared, neoconservatives continued to invoke the threat of “radical Islamic extremism” as the “absolute gravest threat” to the existence of America, even conceding that another 9/11-like terrorist attack would be “a big advantage to [Republican Presidential candidate John McCain].”
“The Evolution of John McCain,” CNN Fortune Magazine, June 23, 2008 http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/20/magazines/fortune/Evolution_McCain_Whitford.fortune/index.html

Time Magazine, June 19, 2006. Dick Cheney said, “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis . . . it’s about our response.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1205478,00.html

xxvi In the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida, officials at the highest levels of Florida government conspired to weaken black voting power with a flawed program of felon disenfranchisement; disrupt and block a legally mandated recount; and include in the tabulation of overseas military ballots votes cast after Election Day.